"Ed Huntress" wrote in message et...

There is no way the best factories in China are 2/3 as productive as
even the average U.S. factories, and what I've seen tells me that
they're at best only 1/3 as productive.

I've interviewed a number of US manufacturing executives upon their
return from China, and they tend to be shaken up by what they've
seen. One that I quoted in my first article on the subject had just
visited a mold shop in China that he said was running at virtually
the same productivity level as his shop in the US...and he runs one
of the best mold shops in the US. He had visited three others that
he said were slightly below his productivity levels, but not by an
awful lot.

I have a lot of problems believing that the Chinese are that good
except in a few very isolated cases because it took the Japanese a
long, long time to get their productivity and quality up to U.S.
levels, and Japan started out being way ahead of China. Even Taiwan
still has quality problems, and look how advanced they are. There are
always exceptions, but usually even identical factories will almost
always be quite a bit more productive in the First World than in
China, mostly because low-wage workers just aren't valued as much by
management.

This may be why Honda has estimated that its Chinese parts
factories will be only 30% cheaper than those in Japan and
North America, despite wage disparities being much, much greater

It costs Honda nearly $2,000 more to build an Accord in China as
to build it in Japan. The reason is that many of the parts in an
Accord have to be imported from Japan. And the prices for those
parts are exorbitant, because that's how Honda gets profits out
of China: they overcharge the Chinese division for parts costs,
and take the extra margin out as corporate profits. Many foreign
manufacturers in China do the same thing.

Japan always reserves its best factories for Japan, no matter what
they want people in the U.S. to think. I don't know of a single
exception, and the company I work for has studied this like crazy
since the early 1980s, when we first entered Japan (no Chinese
presense, due to the "no dictatorship" rule, which also forced us to
quit Taiwan). The immediate reason Japan is building cars in China is
for political purposes because most countries require domestic
production as a condition for sales (why so many countries have
small-scale kit factories).

The prime reason for job losses in the manufacturing sector is
productivity improving faster than sales,

When you actually run the numbers, you'll see that it's partly
productivity and partly excessive imports. The figures for job
losses due to imports range from 500,000 to 1,200,000, going
from the conservative economists to the more liberal ones.
Mainstream economists are now saying it's something under 800,000.

It takes something like only 35-40% as many workers to produce the
same number of cars as 20-30 years ago, and this isn't going to slow
down. There simply isn't going to be any large scale mass production
in the U.S. in 5 years except where each worker's output is at least
$300K-$500K a year.